The present invention relates to a technique of optimizing operation management verification on equipment such as a server in a data center, and making operation management efficient.
With rapid improvements and widespread use of communication networks, cloud computing that realizes uses of information systems via networks has been becoming more widely used rapidly. As a result, data centers storing the systems have become larger in scales, and have spread out globally; therefore, costs in operation management of the systems have become a serious problem. For example, operation management of a data center includes a wide range of operations on a vast number of servers and network equipment such as confirmation of a work status of equipment, reactivation, batch process, disk backup, handling of abnormalities, and reporting of these operations to clients, and further includes operations on non-information technology (IT) equipment other than servers such as management of air conditioning and power sources, security monitoring and entrance/exit management. Enhancement of operation efficiency is unavoidably necessary. To cope with the problem, efforts for more efficient operation management aimed to reduction of operation management costs have been made such as unification of system operation management by operation management middleware, standardization of an operation management process by Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and automation of an operation task procedure by a run book automation.
However, these efforts depend on automation by, for example, a regular process by a business application and disk backup; thus, they do not go so far as to automate commands for system maintenance and the like of, for example, reactivation and setting of each equipment, and accordingly are performed mainly by manpower. However, operation errors attributable to human errors cannot be avoided with management by manpower, and there is a problem that further process steps are required to handle errors that have occurred. Also, as described above, operation management includes a wide range of tasks and diverse operations on information systems such as servers and networks and those such as management of air conditioning and power sources, security monitoring and entrance/exit management. Management of the interconnected tasks and operations increases a possibility of occurrence of errors. Also, when a plurality of managers are involved in operation management, miscommunication occurs, and contributes to occurrence of errors. Furthermore, when an error occurs, it is very difficult to investigate which manipulation is the cause because the investigation requires tracking of past manipulations by analyzing a log of each equipment.
Methods for automatically executing commands to prevent occurrence of failures have so far been proposed. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2008-117029 discloses a fraud procedure checkout method at the time of creating an operation procedure for preventing in advance fabrication of a fraud procedure without depending on an operator who creates the operation procedure. Fabrication of a fraud procedure is prevented by registering server configuration and client information as configuration information, and registering a possibility of performing a procedure according to a performance time zone as a policy. Also, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2007-26391 discloses a method of judging a possibility of execution with a command execution judging unit based on execution conditions defined in operations rules, and resource information of a management subject.